


Burial at Sea

by Blankdice



Category: Cowboy Bebop
Genre: Flashbacks, M/M, War, self indulgent sad fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-17
Updated: 2017-06-17
Packaged: 2018-11-15 04:52:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,867
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11223720
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Blankdice/pseuds/Blankdice
Summary: Gren hasn't had an easy life, and now it's over. But even in the cold of space, he remembers something warm.





	Burial at Sea

**Author's Note:**

> This is for the first character who really broke my heart. A rewrite of sorts of a really old fic of mine that I found, and was intending to put on here until I actually read it and realised I couldn't do that, but I also couldn't post nothing, so it was gonna have to be something new.

Gren’s life seemed to be defined by explosions. 

The factory accident that killed his father before he could remember the man’s face. The constant drumming of bombs, muffled by the sandstorms. Machine guns and explosions in his final hour, rendering his little zipcraft unable to fly.

Only now there was silence, because if space was anything, it was silent.

He raised his fingers, pressed them to the glass of his pod. His fingertips were going numb, but that was all right. He knew what it would have felt like, and that was cold. Space tended to be cold as well as silent. Neither of those was really his element, but that too was all right. Soon, he’d go out in his very last explosion, in the upper atmosphere of Titan.

The explosions had been almost constant there. A background noise of destruction, impersonal and difficult to pinpoint. That was the thing about the sandstorms, they made everything hard to pin down. Sounds traveled strangely, figures looked distorted, and everything felt gritty and smelled of sulphur.

They would spend days climbing slopes of loose sand, only to double back when some new piece of information revealed they had passed the enemy in broad daylight, more or less, not a hundred yards away but hidden by the storm.

Sometimes it was hard even to see the soldier in front of you, let alone puzzle out who the beige-clad silhouette was meant to be.

Gren had to pull his scarf up high, leaving only the barest slit to look through, and even that was enough for the sand to get into, trickling down and through until everything chafed and he thought he would never feel clean again. Even the water, which they had to ration, crunched between his teeth.

The figure directly in front of him paused and turned. His face was similarly wrapped, but the howling wind had managed to pull a few locks free of the military-issue wrappings. It was a dusty grey, the way tarnished silver can get grey, with the same beige undertones that seemed to creep into everything on this moon.

“Keep up,” the man said, and turned again. 

Gren smiled, because he recognised him, and he knew that for Vicious, pausing even long enough for a snippy remark was a rarity. He put in a burst of whatever energy he had left, forced his feet to plow through the sand and wishing for traction. It was hard, as the dunes were almost liquid, they moved so much under his boots. Marching across the dunes of Titan was one of the hardest things he had done. Still, he had been doing this for months now, so he knew how to push himself, how to balance his weight so he could, just for a moment, cross a little more of that dune.

It turned out to be just enough to land him inside the blast zone of the next explosion. 

It hit from the side, a brief flash in the sandstorm followed by a rush of hot air laced with sand. Only then did the noise reach them, oddly gentle as the blast of air scoured his cheeks and his bare hands. 

Gren closed his eyes instinctively as he lunged for Vicious. He caught a sleeve, then an arm, felt Vicious grab for him in return. The sand shifted under their feet, truly liquid now, and they could only hold on as it pulled their legs from under them. It rushed around them, pulling at their clothes and their packs and pulling them down unstoppably, into one of the moon’s semi-natural ravines.

It was no coincidence they had been caught in the blast together. Gren and Vicious had established a routine on Titan.

They were both odd ones out. Vicious was quiet and moody, and no one really wanted to put up with him. There was something about his eyes. You looked into them and you could tell the man wanted nothing more than to be left alone. There was something off-putting in Gren’s eyes as well, but it was different. It was almost innocent, especially when he smiled, and the longer the war went on, the more people stayed away from him. That’s the thing about innocence. It always gets ruined in the end, and it’s a painful thing to be reminded of. 

Both of them were time bombs, in a particular way. It had made them little islands in the sea of beige uniforms, one of them always silent, and the other painfully vibrant. Sometimes it seemed the only bit of colour of Titan was Gren’s eyes, and the only thing that was truly colourless was Vicious’ hair. It had made them comrades. 

While on the march, they tended to go where they were told, though Gren stuck close to Vicious whenever he could. When they made camp, Gren would find somewhere to sit. A ledge or a quiet place under an overhang, or a couple of rickety camp chairs with their legs sinking so far into the sand it they might as well have sat directly on the ground. Once he had found a place, Vicious would unfailingly come to find him.

Gren shook a cigarette out of the gritty carton, stuck it into his mouth and held up the box. There were footsteps behind him, audible in the hissing of the sand, and Vicious reached over, took the box.

“You’re welcome,” Gren said chipperly, patting down his pockets for a lighter. The carton dropped into his lap. Vicious never said thank you, so Gren implied it for him. He sometimes wondered if that annoyed the man, but if it did he was just too stubbornly quiet to say.

There was a rattle and a click behind him, and Vicious’ hand appeared once more in his peripheral vision, this time holding a lighter.

Gren pulled his hands from his pockets, where he’d only managed to find sand, and folded a hand over Vicious’ to light his cigarette. He took a deep breath, cigarette smoke and the smell of sulphur and for once, as this night held a rare night without a sandstorm, cold air.

Next to him, Vicious sat in the sand, grunting as he crossed his legs. He sniffed and said, after a moment: “You picked a shitty spot tonight.”

“Best place to see the stars,” Gren said. He raised a hand. The sky was dark and clear, a dusty haze on the horizon but above them nothing but the stars. There were just so many of them, too. You could say what you wanted about Titan, but it had very little light pollution. 

Vicious looked up, then turned to Gren. “Best place for the stars to see us,” he said.

“There’s no one flying right now,” said Gren. He took another drag of his cigarette. “Too afraid they’ll be shot down, it’s so clear. I’m willing to bet it’ll be quiet until the next sandstorm hits. You know what would really finish this scene?”

Vicious was quiet, not even bothering to shake his head. 

“A little music,” Gren said. “I know a woman back home, she plays the fiddle like a demon. If she were here now, she could play us a little variation on a starry sky.” 

“Best she isn’t, then,” Vicious said, and was silent for the rest of the evening, as Gren laughed, and then told him about his mother’s cat, and his mother, about the stars and his saxophone and pretty much anything he could think of. 

Vicious was a pretty good listener, if you could forgive him for never acknowledging a word you were saying.

Still, though he was quiet, he was always present. There was a coiled tension to him, and Gren could always tell when he was standing behind him, even when he hadn’t made a sound.

Gren opened his eyes. The explosion, that one explosion in a million that crystallised into something more than a sound and a distant flashing, into something physical and violent that slapped the two of them off the dune, was still ringing in his ears. It was all he could hear and all he could feel and for a moment, he was convinced he’d lost Vicious on the way down.

Then he looked again, and Vicious was there, all the tension drained out of him. They’d landed on the sand floor of the ravine, sand streaming down and piling up on top of them as they lay. 

When Gren pushed himself up, he dislodged a minor avalanche of sand. He’d ended up on top, which was probably a good thing or he might not have been able to get up altogether. It did mean he had to be careful how he moved, or risk dumping a scarf full of sand into Vicious’ face.

He stood, stumbled, and moved back in. 

“Hey,” he said, and the sound was strange in the ravine. Whether it was the enclosed space or the aftereffects of the bomb, he didn’t know. “Hey, Vicious.”

Gren bent, laid a hand against Vicious’ face. The scarf had fallen away at some point in their tumble, leaving most of his face bare. Like Gren, all of his bare skin was gritty with sand and raw. It hurt Gren to touch him, his fingertips burning with the contact. Judging by Vicious’ reaction, he was not the only one. 

The man groaned and wrenched an arm free of the sand. He lashed out, groggily, and missed. In fact, he nearly hit Gren in the face, and the only reason Gren managed to dodge out of the way in time was the massive pile of sand still on top of Vicious. 

“Hey,” Gren said again, “it’s just me.”

Vicious grabbed at him again and this time caught his wrist. He blinked, awareness slowly coming back into his eyes like the winding of a spring, and said: “Get me out of here.”

Gren had to shovel some of the sand away with his bare hands before he could pull Vicious to his feet, and even then he had to physically hold the man up. The two of them staggered away from the sandfall, to a place in the ravine where the dust in the air was minimal and nothing threatened to fall on them. Vicious’ arm was around Gren’s shoulders and their legs kept knocking together. 

“Do you think they’re still up there?” Gren said, after he’d sat Vicious down and was pulling one of their packs from the sand. “I have no idea how long it’s been, or if they’ve even noticed we’re gone. We should probably try to get back up regardless, they’ll never find us down here.”

“Thank you,” Vicious said, eyes downcast.

“We should see if,” Gren started. “Uh, we should.” He blinked.

Vicious looked up, a tight smile on his face. “This is where you say you’re welcome,” he said.

“You’re welcome,” Gren repeated. 

“We should get back up there,” Vicious said, and stood again, only a little unsteady on his feet.

The two of them dug out the second pack together, and then they walked the ravine until it sloped upward, allowing them to climb back up into the sea of dunes. Twilight had started setting in before they even fell, but twilight on Titan was a long time. They walked for hours, struggling through the sand together, before night had fallen completely.

Gren stopped, leaned against a rocky outcropping and tried to massage some life back into his legs. “This is worse than a regular march,” he said, his breath pluming in the air in front of him. The sandstorm had died down when they were climbing out of the ravine, and now that they were back in the dunes, the temperature was dropping. 

“Because there’s no one here to tell you when we’ve had a full shift,” Vicious said. He was looking up, eyes darting from one star to the next.

“It’s too clear for fighters,” Gren reminded him. “And that, but also because neither of us is carrying a tent.”

Vicious narrowed his eyes, kept studying the sky. It was as though he was looking for something. 

At night, the yellows of Titan appeared dimmer. There was still an orange haze around the horizon, a red glow to the rocks and the sand around them, but the all-intrusive beige of the daytime sandstorms retreated. For about three hundred and sixty hours, the sand would be red and the sky would be a dim orange whenever it wasn’t black and starry. 

As Vicious looked to the sky, Gren looked at the dunes. They were still more orange than red, dissolving before too long into the the distant sunset on a new, approaching sandstorm. As long as the night was clear it would be cold, and as soon as the next sandstorm hit it would be harder to see, harder to keep marching. It made sense to make as much distance as they could, as long as the clear weather held.

“I’m tired,” Gren said.

Vicious finally looked away from the sky. “We can take a break.”

Gren sighed and said, reluctantly: “We should probably keep going, though.”

“Makes no sense to push yourself to exhaustion.” Vicious walked up and pushed at Gren, motioning him to sit down. “Get some rest, I’ll keep watch.”

“I’ll get cold,” Gren said, and it was a gamble, because it was the truth but it was also an excuse. A flimsy one, the kind of cliche you’d find in visual novels and cheap romance flicks. More flimsy still, because Gren had never made a secret of the fact that he rather liked Vicious, in one way or another.

Vicious was quiet for a moment, and then that tight smile returned. “Flirting with me?”

“Does it make a difference, if I really will be cold by myself?” Gren asked.

“You’ll be no less cold with me,” said Vicious. 

Gren held out a hand. “You’re not as cold as you pretend to be,” he said, and when Vicious accepted the gesture after only a brief moment of hesitation, his hand was warm in Gren’s.

When Gren woke again, the stars in the sky were gone, replaced by a new sandstorm turning everything brown and murky. Through the soup, they could see lights in the distance. Dim little pinpricks, very unlike stars but guiding their way nonetheless.

They were even lucky enough to find their own side on the other end of the lights.

That same night, Vicious came to Gren, where he had found a little vacant tent. He smelled vaguely herbal, a smell Gren recognised from the gunk the camp medic had rubbed into his hands for the abrasions.

“Want a cigarette?” Gren asked, not bothering to stand. His legs were tired and he was more or less comfortable, as comfortable as you could be when your bedroll was full of sand, and so were your shoes, and your sandwich too.

“No,” Vicious said, and fell silent, standing over him as motionless as one of Titan’s rock formations.

“Sandwich?” Gren offered, though his sandwich was already half-eaten. “A bit of space on my bedroll?”

“No,” Vicious said, “and yes.”

“Huh,” Gren said. He shoved the last of his sandwich into his mouth. It was gritty, but no worse than usual. “Is the flirting working?”

“You’re terrible at it,” Vicious said, and knelt down, nudged him off the bedroll. 

Gren stood, though his legs were burning with the effort, and watched Vicious rearrange his tent, tucking his bedroll neatly to one side, next to Gren’s. It was a small tent, and though both bedrolls fit, there was no more space in there for anything else. 

“I still think it’s working,” Gren said.

Vicious gave him a look, reached over to pull him into the tent. As he zipped the entrance closed, he said: “I’ll get cold.”

Gren learned, after that, how Vicious smiled. It wasn’t often, and it wasn’t anything big, but it was genuine. He had believed so hard that it was genuine. Maybe it had been, and maybe it had all been nothing but loneliness and an easy opportunity. 

Some days, he barely knew what to think anymore. He’d believed it, and then he hadn’t, and then he found himself thinking of Titan and feeling homesick. He hadn’t just believed in Vicious’ smiles, he had believed in the man. He thought he’d known him, was able to read his face, stoic as it may seem.

Perhaps he’d been reading him wrong. When he thought there was a pattern, maybe there had been nothing at all. And when he had finally pulled the trigger on Vicious, maybe the expression written on Vicious’ face really had been nothing significant, least of all relief.

Gren’s hand dropped from the glass of his pod. Outside, space was quiet, and cold.

Some time later, his zipcraft burned up in the atmosphere of Titan. It was a murky day, sandstorms blotting out much of the sunlight, let alone the brief flare of a single bit of space debris breaking up high above the surface.

Two satellites registered his fall. No one came to see.


End file.
